Battle for Iowa commences

WATERLOO, Iowa – The road to the Iowa caucuses narrowed abruptly Sunday with the two key candidates, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Gov. Rick Perry, converging on this eastern Iowa town to introduce — and reintroduce— themselves to voters, and to one another.

Bachmann, the Waterloo native, returned as the Iowa front-runner after a convincing victory in the straw poll Saturday, a win that forced her bitterest rival, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, out of the race Sunday morning. Perry arrived in Iowa after stops in South Carolina and New Hampshire, and he will spend three days here, underscoring that he — unlike the third leading candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — won’t be ceding Iowa to Bachmann or trying to downplay its significance.

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“My goal is to finish No. 1 in every contest,” Perry said in New Hampshire on Saturday.

Perry made his way around the dinner tables at the Black Hawk County Republican dinner, shaking hands and posing for pictures ahead of the event at the Electric Park Ballroom.

Asked what his goal was for his Iowa debut, the Texan responded by slapping a reporter on the back and saying: “I think we’re doing it.”

The only comments he made for cameras came when a tea party activist put a microphone in front of him and asked for a greeting.

Perry’s play in Bachmann’s bailiwick — Waterloo is, after all, where she grew up and announced her candidacy in late June — isn’t necessarily bravado, or delusion. While mid-August would typically be far too late to begin organizing in labor-intensive Iowa, Bachmann arrived only six weeks earlier.

Indeed, Perry’s shot at Iowa is among the clearest signs of the unusually wide-open nomination contest. And while Perry’s decision to compete with the Ames Straw Poll for attention yesterday irritated some local Republican activists, his long, early trip, in fact, likely ensures that Iowa will be a crucial early test. In Romney’s absence, the state was in danger of being an afterthought, ceded to Bachmann and downplayed by the media.

Perry’s impending arrival forces a decision on Romney, who has kept one foot in and one foot out of the caucus process. Now there’s reason for Romney to take another look — Bachmann, Perry and even former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in the event she runs, would be competing for the same conservative Republican voters, perhaps offering Romney a path to a plurality victory.

But what appears likely to be a high-profile, high-stakes contest in Iowa also makes it harder for Romney to try to bypass the process, and he risks being drawn into the sort of two-front battle that helped swamp his 2008 campaign. Perry’s stated intention to compete everywhere also makes clear the degree to which Romney’s strategy of carefully picking and choosing his fights is a mark, above all, of weakness.